Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran: Challenging the Status Quo

EXCERPTED FROM Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran: Challenging the Status Quo edited by Abbas Milani and Larry Diamond Copyright © 2015 ISBNs: 978-1-62637-146-0 hc 978-1-62637-147-7 pb 1800 30th Street, Suite 314 Boulder, CO 80301 USA telephone 303.444.6684 fax 303.444.0824 This excerpt was downloaded from the Lynne Rienner Publishers website www.rienner.com Contents Preface vii Introduction Abbas Milani and Larry Diamond 1 1 Ayatollah Khomeini’s Theory of Government Arash Naraghi 15 2 Cleavages in Iranian Politics Since 1979 Hossein Bashiriyeh 33 3 Democracy After the Green Movement Mehrangiz Kar 69 4 Examining Iran’s Legal Structure Fatemeh Haghighatjoo 91 5 The Rule of the Basij in Iranian Politics Saeid Golkar 115 6 A Portrait of the Persian Blogosphere John Kelly and Bruce Etling 141 7 The Role of Social Media: Myth and Reality Mehdi Yahyanejad 165 8 The Revolution and Music: A Personal Odyssey Mohsen Namjoo 179 9 Iran’s Democratic Movements Abbas Milani 217 Epilogue: A History of Postrevolutionary Iran : A Prose Poem Simin Behbahani 259 Bibliography 271 The Contributors 285 Index 287 About the Book 301 v Introduction Abbas Milani and Larry Diamond n his annual State of the Nation message, delivered the day after the IPersian New Year (Nowrooz) in 2014, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei lamented at some length over what he said was the country’s cultural malaise. A few weeks later, he told a meeting of the eighty-six-man Assembly of Experts (also known as the Council of Experts)—constitutionally responsible for choosing and overseeing the work of the supreme leader—that what keeps him awake at night is the culture war and the fact that the country is drifting away from what he considers the safe and sanguine ethos of Islamic values. Since then, hardly a week has gone by when some high-ranking official, close to Khamenei’s coterie of power, has not voiced anxiety about the country’s cultural drift. A hint of the sources of his anxiety could be seen in the 2014 annual Fajr Festival—a film festival organized each year in Tehran around the time of the Islamic Revolution’s victory in 1979. Iranian cinema has been much acclaimed internationally, but domestically eight years of the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presidency produced stagnation and a prolifer - ation of “Islamic” movies. These were invariably a poor imitation of old Hollywood, Bollywood, or even crassly commercial movies of prerevo - lutionary Iran, laundered with a superficial dose of piety and repackag - ing the cardboard heroes of previous blockbusters as martyrs of Islam or of the eight-year war with Iraq (1980–1988). In 2014 something unusual and telling happened at the festival. Every movie that had a whiff of “official” or “Islamic” ideology was booed and interrupted with inces - sant clapping. Of course, clapping itself is a taboo according to the offi - cial ideology; singing the praise of Allah and his Prophet or the supreme leader is Islamic, while clapping is dismissed and derided as a relic of Western influence. 1 2 Abbas Milani and Larry Diamond Iran today is undergoing a profound, even historic sociocultural transition. Much of the media, however, and many scholars have ignored this transition to focus instead on either the nuclear issue or the political and economic aspects of the country’s turmoil. Sometimes, the issue of sanctions and the falling value of the Iranian currency and other times Ahmadinejad and his denial of the Holocaust have been the focus of attention. Occasionally, the increasing role of the Islamic Revolu - tionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in every facet of Iranian society and its growing economic dominance has caught the attention of Western media and scholars. For a while, the functions and rising power of the IRGC’s elite unit—the Qods Brigade—and its commander, General Qassem Suleimani, took center stage. At times, commentators have con - templated the relative power of Ayatollah Khamenei and the IRGC. Iran’s command economy and the endemic corruption in a system par - tially dominated by bonyads (foundations) and directly controlled by Ayatollah Khamenei himself have not failed to attract some attention. Ayatollah Khamenei’s possible sickness, his penchant for anti-Ameri - canism, and the already raging battle to shape the process of choosing his successor have been a favorite topic of commentators and journal - ists. During Ahmadinejad’s last two years as president, his cantankerous relations with Khamenei, as well as Khamenei’s increasingly tense rela - tions with his friend of fifty years, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, have been hard to ignore. Other analyses have focused on the rift between the heads of Iran’s three ostensibly independent branches of government. Of course, there has also been much attention devoted to the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programs and the prospects for a broader rapprochement between Iran and the United States. But other elements of Iran’s dynamic society have received less than adequate attention. In particu - lar, the ongoing struggle for freedom and its often subtle but persistent efforts to defy the regime’s procrustean prescriptions, not just on poli - tics but on every facet of daily life and culture, has received less atten - tion than it deserves. When the tumults of Iran have appeared in the form of a mass- mobilized movement for democracy and against electoral rigging—as they did in June 2009, when by some estimates 3 million people came out in the capital city of Tehran alone to peacefully protest against what they thought was a rigged election—the world certainly paid attention. But the media coverage was short-lived. The role of social media, even Twitter, was the subject of some attention. Iran was declared, maybe prematurely, to have attempted the first Twitter Revolution. The promi - nent role played by women in both the education system and in political Introduction 3 protests also caught the eye of some journalists, photographers, and scholars. The shocking images of Neda Aghasoltan, a young woman killed by a bullet while she was peacefully protesting in the aftermath of the 2009 election, became iconic of the Green Movement: a peaceful social movement that came to support the presidential candidacy of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and eventually to protest what people believed were rigged results. Neda and the Green Movement, no less than the nuclear negotia - tions, have figured prominently in English-language reporting and analysis. However, when the struggle for democracy or individual free - doms has taken more subtle or subaltern forms, when acts of dissent and even defiance of regime authority have become more politically metaphorical and less literal, media attention and scholarly scrutiny have been scant. In the language of literature, as Jorge Luis Borges reminded us, censorship is the mother of metaphors; in the language of social action, too, oppression and censorship, brutality and limits on freedom, and finally clumsy attempts at cultural engineering—all hall - marks of the Islamic Republic’s behavior in most of its thirty-four-year tenure—beget social metaphors, and more specifically, attempts to resist and dissent in symbolic domains. Unless we listen to these voices and deconstruct the political meaning of their acts, we will, in our view, fail to grasp the real complexities of Iran today—and thus we will fail to anticipate its future. For far too long, the motto that if it can’t be measured then it does not exist (or is of no significance) has blinded many scholars to the immeasurable shifts in Iranian cultural values and social practices. In the long run, these deep transformations of culture and social relations taking place in Iran today may prove to have a bigger impact on its democratic prospects than the overt cleavages and conflicts in the cur - rent political system. A veritable renaissance and reformation are under way in virtually every aspect of the cultural, social, aesthetic, sexual, and even religious canvas of Iran. Many of these developments are being forged (often at great risk) from within Iran’s borders, and in different discursive forms. Thus, only those intimately familiar with the nuances of these cultural, aesthetic, and social theoretical domains can document the dimensions of these changes. The Iranian diaspora—some 5 to 6 million exiles—is even more reflective of this change. Their increasing financial, manage - rial, scholarly, and political power has allowed them to become an important agent of transformation. Because of the possibilities of the information age and social media, the diaspora is now a virtual part of 4 Abbas Milani and Larry Diamond Iranian civil society—the cauldron of transformation with which we are most concerned in this book. Unless we understand these changes, we cannot effectively appraise the prospects for a democratic transition in Iran. Nor can we realistically assess the fragility of the regime’s cultural and social hegemony, despite its seemingly stable political domination. What makes the erosion of the regime’s cultural hegemony even more perilous is that, according to some economists inside Iran (not a few sympathetic to or working with the regime), it is accompanied by a seri - ous economic crisis. Arguably the most alarming report on the economy coming from within the country was delivered by Mohsen Ranani in March 2014 at a think tank led by Iran’s past reformist president Mohammad Khatami. Not just the ex-president himself, but many top policymakers were in attendance. Many websites inside and outside the country published the text of the talk. 1 Ranani said that the Iranian economy had entered a stage of what he calls “singularity”—in effect, a point of no return.

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